Fixing Things Important to Your Customer

In today's article in the online publication, Destination CRM.com, Low Costs Drive the Gartner Magic Quadrant, about CRM CSS a.k.a. Customer Relationship Management and Customer Service Contact Center it's not just about cost. The trend called out is "end customers identifying the processes they deem broken -- and then specifically fixing those."

The customer is clearly in the drivers seat. The article makes some specific recommendations for supporting this trend in terms of software functionality:

• multichannel capabilities;
• native business-process management for customer service functions;
• support of online user communities;
• extension of agent presence to online communities;
• customer data integration;
• integration of knowledge solutions onto the agent desktop;
• real-time decision support; and
• integration with mobile devices.

Also a great list for understanding why slow adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, especially collaborative networks, is going to cost the slow adopters plenty if their competitors get the picture first. As mentioned in an earlier posting, it is also yet another indication that marketing will be more network communications (netcom), a name we suggest will one day replace marketing communications as we continue to migrate operations to the Web.